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Snowing Like a Bastard

When we visited Iowa over the summer, my sister, DNOS, maintained it would be an early fall and winter.

“My knees know,” she proclaimed with the authority of one of those grande dames you always see in the movies.

Rob tends to dismiss anything not based in actual science, which includes not only the Farmer’s Almanac but DNOS’s knees.

“How can her knees in Iowa predict the weather for us 1500 miles away in Western Canada?” he said, and it’s a fair question, but it doesn’t discount the fact that it snowed last week a few times. Just light flurries here and there. Enough to dust lawn and foliage.

And then the day before Halloween, snow began to pile up. Not alarmingly so until a blustery snow moved in Halloween night just as the kids were beginning to make the rounds for Trick or Treat and then transformed into a determined snowstorm.

“It’s snowing like a bastard,” I informed my husband when Dee and I returned from making our rather solitary rounds to collect candy with a side trip to the bookmobile.

“You are sounding more Canadian all the time,” he marveled.

Yesterday I took to the road and trekked into The Park. Travel was not being advised but when one lives in a winter prone area, one cannot always count of advisable travel in the face of shit that needs to be done.

The ladies at the yoga studio, while admiring my fortitude, told me that next time I should just call and tell them I will be a day late. I needed to drop off applications for a training program and pay fees. The deadline was the 1st and even though I’d talked to the program’s instructor and she knew I was registering, I still like to make deadlines.

Adam the radio host was rambling about 5 to 10 centimeters expected when I left the studio and headed for the mall, but clearly that mark was off already. It must be disheartening to be a meteorologist because the margin for error is high and near instantly noticeable. Unlike say, the POTUS, you can’t magic statistics around to hide when you are a bit, or a lot, off.

I needed to pick up a dressy outfit for Dee at the mall. Grade Five hosts the Remembrance Day assembly.

“I need black earrings,” she said.

Even her earrings need to be somber to the point of mournful.

I love the lead up to Remembrance Day. Everyone sports a poppy on their lapels and Dee runs around the house singing “Flanders Field”, a depressing dirge but oddly inspiring.

“It’s funny that for Canadians the big war is World War I but for the Americans, it is the Second World War,” I mentioned to Rob later in the shower.

Rob snorted a bit, “That’s because the Americans barely showed up for the first war.”

Indeed, their appearance wasn’t as noteworthy as the share of credit they give themselves for that particular engagement.

Aside from bum windshield wipers, the arrival of winter hasn’t been remarkable. Earlier than it has even been since I have lived here, but Rob assures me I just haven’t lived here long enough. In Alberta there really is no norm for the timing of snow.

Last year the warm weather hung around until nearly Halloween and snow took it’s time arriving and buggered off early in the spring. I don’t think that will be the case this year. But we had a decent warm summer for a change, so I will find contentment in that and just give in to the change of seasons. It’s the yoga thing to do.